Birthplace of Buddy Guy

George Guy was the first of five children of Sam and Isabel, sharecroppers near Lettsworth, and he picked cotton as a boy. With no money for an instrument he made himself a two-string diddley bow, and a Harmony acoustic guitar came to him later. In the mid-1950s he began playing with bands in Baton Rouge and held a custodian's job at Louisiana State University. A cotton row and a janitor's cart were what Lettsworth and Baton Rouge offered him; the blues were what he made out of them.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Louisiana State Penitentiary Museum — 6.1 mi
  The Angola museum outside the penitentiary gate, opened in 1997 on the history of crime and punishment in Louisiana, on ground where convicts were leased out as what 64 Parishes calls legal slave labor.
• Rosedown Plantation State Historic Site — 22 mi
  A cotton plantation worked by hundreds of enslaved people, whose names survive in an 1862 succession list; the Turnbull house and gardens, and the quarters nobody has yet found.
• Tunica-Biloxi Museum — 25 mi
  The Tunica-Biloxi Tribe of Louisiana's own museum at Marksville, built around the Tunica Treasure that the tribe won back in court.
• Audubon State Historic Site — 25 mi
  Oakley House, where Audubon taught drawing and painted 32 birds in 1821, and the two cabins behind it where four Black families lived through slavery, Reconstruction and Jim Crow.

More markers nearby

• St. Stephen's Episcopal Church and Cemetery — 3.4 mi
• Old River — 5.2 mi
• White Hall Plantation House — 5.6 mi
• Buddy Guy — 5.6 mi